T.I. Describes Joint Album With B.o.B. As A ‘Hybrid’

T.I. and B.o.B are both gearing up to release solo projects next year, and since they’re already spending so much time in the studio together, they decided to collaborate on a joint album as well. They’ve revealed that the LP will be called The Man and the Martian and Tip says that the album will be a true blend of their respective sounds. “Initially I’m the Man and he’s the Martian—to the naked eye,” T.I. told MTV News. “But once you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll find that he’s the Man sometimes and I’m the Martian.”

“We’ve recorded maybe five or six songs already, but we’re both focusing on completing our solo projects first and if we need to pull from those songs for my project or his project, so be it,” T.I. said, when asked about a potential release date for the album. “When we release our projects then we’ll able to collectively and solely focus on The Man and the Martian. He has a sound that is very diverse, and different from mine, and he calls me in for the same reason when he records his projects. So we have so many songs that it only made sense.”

Tip and his Grand Hustle signee have collaborated on tracks before, but you can’t help but wonder what an entire album from the two emcees—with their noticeably different styles—would sound like. Luckily, T.I. was armed with plenty of descriptive words for the project.

“It will be a plethora of styles, sounds, a wide array of performance induced confusion,” an animated T.I. explains. “You gon’ have some glamorous gangsta and some intelligent nerd-type weird, just wonderful, magnificent, magical—the music is going to just jump out the speakers and knock you down and wake you back up to knock you down again. That’s the best description I can give you.”

If that’s just the description, we can only imagine what the album will sound like. “It’s not gonna be like either one of our music,” he added. “It’s gonna be a collective infusion—it will be a hybrid, that’s what it’ll be. It’s gonna be a collage of adjectives and verbs.”